When you start the year as a FTSE 100 company, but end it in second place on the list of the “modern Christmas cracker jokes” (according to UKTV’s comedy channel Gold) you can assume it’s been a challenging year.

The company in question is, of course, Sports Direct, which spent 2016 engulfed by a crisis over pay and working conditions at its depot in Shirebrook, Derbyshire, where it was revealed that workers were effectively receiving less than the national minimum wage after unpaid body searches and tough financial penalties for slight lateness. Hence the chart-topping gag: what do workers at Sports Direct get for Christmas dinner? Answer: about five minutes.

But was that really the funniest Sports Direct crack of the year? Maybe not. There was the one where founder Mike Ashley went through a mock security check as part of a PR campaign to demonstrate he really was a man of the people, only to then pull a wad of £50 notes out of his pocket; a similar joke about the company buying a private jet, but allowing staff to rent it for a commercial rate; plus another one when MPs visited Shirebrook only to discover they were being secretly recorded. Still, the most hilarious joke was surely delivered by chairman Keith Hellawell in September, when he refused to resign.

A great year for fiction … in British politics

The Man Booker prize for fiction went to Paul Beatty in 2016 for The Sellout – and no doubt it was well deserved too. But it was scandalous what names were missed off the shortlist.

Somehow the judges overlooked the claims of the Leave campaign in June’s referendum for “We send the EU £350m a week: let’s fund our NHS instead” as well as its rivals in the Remain camp for all sorts of far-fetched plots in its entry, Project Fear.

Pages from that tome included IMF boss Christine Lagarde’s “We have done our homework and we haven’t found anything positive to say about a Brexit vote”; JP Morgan chief Jamie Dimon’s warning he could cut 4,000 UK jobs if Britain voted to leave the EU; plus, of course, then chancellor George Osborne’s warning that he’d have to slash public spending and increase taxes in an emergency budget to tackle a £30bn “black hole”.

We did vote to leave, of course, and FTSE quickly crashed, making all of the above look quite smart. The FTSE then rose above where it was before and never got that low again – while economic data stubbornly refused to fit in with the Remainers’ expectations. They currently look less smart.

Shy and retiring Green heads for a big bash

It is now eight months since BHS collapsed and six months since its former owner Sir Philip Green promised to “sort” the £571m pension deficit. BHS is still bust while Green is still working on a solution (and shouting at people).

That is despite a year in which the constantly cross shopkeeper has been battling it out with his old pal Mike Ashley for the Fred Goodwin Silver Salver, which this page likes to award to Britain’s most despised business person.

Green’s reputation plummeted in 2016 after BHS failed just a year after he had sold the business to the astonishingly unsuitable Dominic Chappell for £1. Both men were then hauled in front of a joint select committee to explain themselves, an exercise that only succeeded in trashing their reputations some more.

The MPs found that the department store had been subjected to “systematic plunder” by former owners, while Green gave “insufficient priority” to the pension scheme.

Still, let’s look on the bright side. Green is partial to having a small birthday party every five years (you know the sort of thing: music by Stevie Wonder, topless modelling by Simon Cowell) and his 2017 birthday is a significant one. In March, the retailing knight turns 65, at which point he’ll be able to draw his state, er, pension.

So, Vladimir, where do you keep your savings?

April saw the release of the Panama Papers, an unprecedented leak of 11.5 million files from the database of the world’s fourth biggest offshore law firm, Mossack Fonseca. The records were obtained from an anonymous source by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, which shared them with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). The ICIJ then shared them with a large network of international partners, including the Guardian, Observer and the BBC. Perhaps the most startling tale to emerge was the network of secret offshore deals and vast loans worth $2bn laying a trail to Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin. The president’s name did not appear in any of the records, but his friends earned millions from deals that seemingly could not have been secured without his patronage, while the documents suggested Putin’s family benefited from this money.

The leak also showed a Panama-based offshore trust set up by David Cameron’s late father had benefited the then prime minister. He ended up making a complete hash of his response by stalling for three days, with four partial statements issued by Downing Street, before confessing he owned shares in the tax haven fund, which he sold for £31,500 just before becoming PM in 2010. Putin’s year improved. Cameron’s didn’t.

Gears start to grind in the gig economy

Not a great year if you run a business in the so-called gig economy, as a number of moves threatened to improve the lot of workers at firms from Hermes to Deliveroo to Uber – and, possibly, undermine their business models.

The UK’s chief taxman referred Hermes to HMRC compliance officers following complaints by couriers that they were being paid at levels equivalent to below the “national living wage”.

The move came after newspaper reports revealed that some self-employed couriers for the company, which delivers for retailers including John Lewis and Next, were taking home less than the legal minimum.

Some 78 couriers subsequently made complaints to Frank Field, the chairman of the Commons work and pensions select committee.

Meanwhile, Deliveroo was told in August that it must pay its workers the minimum wage unless a court rules that they are self-employed, while in November delivery firm CitySprint became embroiled in a similar dispute over the gig economy, when it faced demands to treat its freelance couriers as workers.

That came a month after a tribunal ruled that Uber drivers were not self-employed and should be paid the national living wage, in a landmark case which could affect tens of thousands of workers in the gig economy. Uber immediately said it would appeal.

The long and the short of it, courtesy of Sky

“If there is one issue I regard as crucial to successful investment, it is the need for a long-term approach ... Many people in the financial services industry now acknowledge the need for a seismic shift to long-termism, though sometimes this looks like lip service.”

That was Martin Gilbert, boss of Aberdeen Asset Management, in a blogpost in 2015. And it is also the same Gilbert who, wearing another hat as deputy chairman of Sky, sought instant gratification by waving through the idea that Rupert Murdoch’s £10.75-a-share bid for the TV group was fair – a conclusion he and his committee came to “after a period of negotiation” that lasted about 48 hours.

Anyway, through 21st Century Fox Murdoch formally lodged an £11.7bn bid in December to take control of the two-thirds of Sky he doesn’t already own, meaning he will now need to gain regulatory approval for the deal, which values Sky at more than £18bn.

If it goes through, he would control Sky’s operations in the UK, Germany and Italy in addition to his ownership of the Times, Sunday Times and Sun, and the radio group TalkSport.

Still, some shareholders and analysts accuse Sky of selling on the cheap, pointing out that the shares were at the offer level as recently as February.

How Glasenberg dug himself out of a hole

Considering he has made a habit of topping “not-so-rich” lists since floating Glencore in 2011, 2016 was a stellar year for the commodity trader’s second-largest shareholder and chief executive, Ivan Glasenberg.

The shares have soared by about 200%, taking the value of his holding to more than £3bn and alleviating the crisis that reduced Glasenberg to his last billion.

That turnaround was achieved by hauling Glencore out of its debt hole. Borrowings have been reduced from $30bn to $17.5bn by selling $6bn of assets, cutting expenditure and raising $2.5bn of fresh capital at 125p a share. Glasenberg himself had to write a $211m cheque during that cash call (which is rather impressive) but that punt has paid off handsomely and dividends are set to resume next year.

Still, let’s not be too charitable. For all the successes of 2016, it merely reversed some of the pain of previous years. Glasenberg’s aggressive use of debt created the crisis for the company and the shares are still only worth about half of what they were when they listed at 530p, almost six years ago. Something like 2016’s performance is required in 2017, therefore.

Leicester won – but the bookies didn’t lose

When Leicester City won the Premier League in May – having started the season as a 5,000-1 shot – all the quoted bookmakers started whining that they had paid out £25m, which was dubbed “the biggest loss in British history on a single sporting market”.

What a load of old nonsense that was. What really happened was the bookies coined it in all season on the back of unbelievably freakish results, only to hand a fraction of that back at the death.

Even so, as this page never tires of pointing out, the myth of the bookies being fleeced by Leicester’s triumph comes second only to the even more unbelievable line that the Foxes’ triumph was football’s “greatest fairytale”. No: it was only the third-greatest footballing fairytale in the East Midlands in the past 44 years.